Time to reflect on the Millennium Development Goals

“After a decade of intense focus on the MDGs, little is understood about how they have influenced priorities, strategies and actions of the key stakeholders, and the consequences this has had for global development,” says Ronaldo Munck, Professor of Sociology at Dublin City University and Chair of Development Studies Association of Ireland. He delivered the first UiB Global Annual Lecture at the University of Bergen this May.

The Millennium Development Goals were heralded as the beginning of a new era in international development. Their intended policy objective was to draw attention to important but neglected social issues, setting eight goals to be reached by 2015.

Munck thinks the MDGs have taken on the broader role of defining a development strategy. Used in this way, target setting can unintentionally distort priorities by displacing attention from other objectives, by disrupting national development strategies, disregarding local and indigenous knowledge, and alternative analyses.

The critical debate on the MDGs has so far focused on whether the goals are likely to be met, their composition and methodology for target setting, and the negotiating process. 

“It is not that the MDGs are wrong, but I think it is important to take stock of what has happened over the past decade, quite critically, and look beyond the glossy brochures that state achievements,” says Professor Munck. 

“Most importantly, we have to look at them in terms of development strategies: what has been the role of MDGs in terms of promoting development in the South? Does globalisation do away with the need for national development strategies? We need to remember that nation states are still the dominant places where development takes place.”

Agenda of aid effectiveness

Munck finds it problematic that the MDGs have been driving the Western development effort without a thorough discussion of strategies to reach the goals.

“In the 1960s and the 70s the debate was about national economic development strategies for developing countries. The globalisation revolution of the 1990s did away with that because the whole idea was that you should not protect national industries but allow for the free flow of transnational capital, and that that would create development,” says Professor Munck.

“If you stand back and look at the MDGs, you see they are the social safety net of what is essentially a market driven strategy. They are the bandages on the wounds of the open market created by the Washington consensus.”

“The UN development decades of the 1960s and 70s were about decreasing international inequality and disparity within countries. The new consensus about poverty is a very different thing and we need to ask if something was lost in terms of taking away the focus from inequality.”

Munck thinks that the MDGs are really just targets based on the ‘new public management’ and aid effectiveness as part of a Northern agenda. “But I wonder whether we have not lost something by not keeping that 1960-1970s perspective on development,” he says.

The condition of the developmental state

The most important of all, in terms of what was lost with the introduction of MDGs, he has observed that the focus has gone away from production. Munck points at the falling share of aid to economic infrastructure and the productive sectors, including agriculture, in the least developed countries: it went down from 48 percent in 1994 to 20 percent in 2004.

“Imagine what that does in terms of development capacity and strategies, in for example Uganda. This way of thinking does away with the need for a developmental state, but is there any country in the world that has developed in some way – think India, China and Brazil – without the state playing a strong developmental role?,” he asks.

Professor Munck agrees that the rise of the Asian Tigers in the 1970s and 80s discredited dependency theories. “But their development was driven by a very strong developmental state. It was not driven by free market economics.”

Take the debate

New ways of thinking and seeing the world has been emerging from the indigenous populations of South America. Venezuela under Chavez had a different, and perhaps more nationalistic approach. In Brazil you see a less nationalist but certainly a very home-grown approach to addressing poverty.  “But these things do not come out in the Northern debate.”

Munck wonders whether the new MDGs will allow the space for alternative thinking which might seem exotic and strange, like that of Chavez, Kirchner, Lula and Morales.

“Are their alternative development strategies worth having in the debate or do we stick to a Northern perspective? I think that Irish Aid [the Irish Government’s programme for overseas development] and Norad must have recognized that MDGs are not a solution to everything. But today, most minds are set on MDGs. How do we make the post-MDG debate be part of a broader discussion of development?,” asks Professor Munck.

The University of Bergen is eager to take a leading role in informing the debate around the new development goals.

“We must make sure that research-based knowledge is available for the current work on the new goals and not only of anecdotal value, as is the case with the old MDGs. UiB should use its networks with the likes of Dublin City University and SANORD,” says Tor Halvorsen, who is an International Development expert at UiB Global.

The post MDG effort laid out in “New Global Partnership” (UN 2013) invites to a broad debate both about global development but also the relationship between the G8 countries (where 80 percent of world capital and production capacity is located) and the rest of the world.

“Norway and Ireland are both fairly independent in these debates and could raise the discussion of these issues because we don’t have the baggage of other countries.  Maybe it is time for a broader discussion,” suggests Professor Munck.